


Play You On Repeat

by Waterloo



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen, Hogwarts, I Don't Even Know, JUST, M/M, Meta, What Was I Thinking?, even tho I'm english, go with it I guess, jk Rowling should pay for all of our therapy yo, lol, or perhaps just real bitter, short but sweet, that would be my first act as president
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 13:45:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13742187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waterloo/pseuds/Waterloo
Summary: A girl wakes up in a room full of books. They all tell the story of a boy who tried to save the world.(ORA pretentious pastiche to reading harry potter fan fiction and how it destroys you)





	Play You On Repeat

**Author's Note:**

> Right so. This started as like a Book Thief death narratory thingy and then it became this meta monster. It's probably terrible but I'm sick of seeing it in my documents unfinished so here you are darlings.  
> Comment if you too are a soulless goon trapped in a seemingly endless room of harry potter fiction.

**Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself. -** Sir Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad.

  


  


In one version, Harry Potter lives to tell the tale. He marries the girl, he has the children. He lives to a pleasant old age and he dies in his bed. He is content.

In one version, Harry Potter survives. But just in one. 

______________________ 

Harry Potter, eleven years old and newly acquainted with the wizarding world, is boarding the Hogwarts Express for the first time. Well, the first time in this universe.   There will be a strange sense of nostalgia to the trip, the sense that he is seeing everything through an old sepia photograph, looking back on the present. He will step over a bulge in the red carpet and have the strangest feeling that once he tripped. The taste of chocolate frogs will be tinged with remembrance, although he is almost certain he has not had one before. 

 But these are all thoughts that loiter on the edge of his mind, pushed aside by the thrill of first journeys and new places.

 This boy is not used to freedom. His personality, his exuberance and curiosity and precocity, is still tempered with the knowledge that he will have to fit it into a cupboard. This Harry Potter learned how to make himself a small target, to find the places with the least flying arrows about. He is awed by the joy that seems to ooze from every gilded compartment and gleaming window. He wants to dive in head first and stay as far away as possible all at the same time. He is terrified and overjoyed and in a year this boy will be dead.

 You see in some versions the happy ending isn't as clear. In some versions, like this one, Harry Potter is shown the whole world, and hardly gets to see it at all. But he is happy, so childishly happy, and in my opinion this version is the kindest I've come across. I run my hands over this boys lives and they appear like books in a library. Endless shelves, running on into infinity. Some spines stretch for miles- telling the story of a life long lived. Others last only an inch. 

 But in this story a bespectacled boy with threadbare jeans was shown the value of kindness by well meaning strangers. An old man opening the door, a young women offers him a sweet. This Harry Potter hoards kindness the way his cousin hoards broken toys and he replicates it. 

 This boy is placed in the House of badgers. He makes good friends, he is kind and he is diligent and for just a few short months this boy is shown a world where kindness isn't rationed. He is happy. But kindness won't do as bravery will in the face of danger; It will save as many souls as possible even if it means sacrificing it's own. Harry Potter walks into that maze of traps alone. He doesn't get to the stone, or the enemy waiting at the end. His life is snuffed out somewhere along the way. Something innocuous, a plant or a chess piece or a potion. An extinguisher on a flame. It isn't a painless death, but he is spared much that would have broken this boy. It is not painless, but it is kind.

This is the second life. 

______________________

I awoke stolen in this hall of mirrors. I know nothing else. I breath and I run and I stare at the stretched reflections of a lonely boy and try to find meaning in a narrative that does not care.

I do not know anything but him. 

_______________________ 

 A snapshot from some story along the way; Two ginger boys, one green eyed and scarred and the other plain. They tell each other jokes. They say they could be twins. They bond over their mothers, both ginger matriarchs. Neither dies too early, neither sees too much pain. But this is the only true conversation they will have. They will not be best friends. They will live unadorned lives.     

 They watched as a brown haired boy named Neville saves the world, and they cheer for him and turn back to their living. 

_______________________ 

A bucktoothed girl is born timid and the story changes again. Two boys die in a tricksters maze. Two candles streaming smoke into the sky in the name of protection. A bad ending. 

_______________________

This one is a love story. The kind you'd expect to find draped in ball gowns and tragedy. But Harry Potter has his love story in school robes, green this time, and he falls in love with a boy who is more brittle confidence than kindness. He breathes the fire his name promises; witty and harsh and defensive. 

 The dragon kisses Harry Potter under the stars his family stole. The dog star, the heart of the lion. You can see every awful blazing sun from Scotland. He knocks the boys glasses off for better access and the boy does not demand back his vision of the stars. The dragon is all he needs. The only thing he wants. Harry Potter will love Draco Malfoy with his dying breathe. 

 He dies in a graveyard at fourteen. It is a mercy. The lovers saved from fighting on opposite sides of the war. 

A tragedy averted. 

_______________________ 

In one story the boy isn't born. His mother bleeds out only a few weeks in. He is hardly here at all. His mother has another baby. Black hair, hazel eyes. A girl.

She does not save the world.

_______________________

The boy never makes it very far. Sometimes he flickers out in a mist of light the colour of his mother's eyes. Sometimes he bleeds as crassly as mere muggles. Bumps and bruises and breaks. A human death. Some times he gets far enough to fight diseases they can't cure. These are the worlds where he is raised my Lily and James. They are sweet to him. He always dies anyway. 

I don't understand this boy. I do not understand his meaning. 

_______________________ 

Another red tie. Bravery seeped deep into strong bones. He was never offered greatness by a magic hat, this boy bleeds red and gold. 

 Another romance. The same boy, but this time sporting blue. He likes to tell Harry Potter he is stupid before kissing him. Harry Potter makes the first move. All that bravery boiling over and pushing him forward. Bravery gets him killed. 

 A boy with blonde hair cries over a casket and thinks that he should have been smarter. Loved someone with the ambition to live, not the bravery to die a hero's death.

 But the dragon doesn't know what I do. I have never found a world where Draco Malfoy doesn't fall in love with Harry Potter.

_______________________ 

Sometimes the lines converge. I find myself witnessing the ending to stories I have already seen play through. We have crossed a wire somewhere. We have followed half faded footsteps and found ourselves exactly as we were before. It doesn't matter. This boy dies with the same fresh pain every time.

I am getting tired of watching. 

_______________________ 

I soon find that the worst pain is every almost perfect universe. The lifespan and the hero and the boy- but no parents. The parents and the lifespan- but no boy, no happiness. The boy- no survival. A missing ingredient. A loss before the taking. A missed beat.

I wish I could twist the pages. Have him hear me as I call out every desperate command. No, not that way. That way is where the monster thrives. I run my hands across pages that do not feel my touch. I cannot find a door. I cannot find my way out.

I feel the pain twist my guts up and burn out my arteries. I feel a million fucking paper cuts across my skin. 

_______________________ 

The bushy haired girl is back. Dark Skinned in this one and the boy is too. They are beautiful in this new defiance. A new kind of courage learned- one of defiance and difference. Learning to be outcasts, together. 

They are brilliant. They almost make it. 

_______________________

I like him best this way. Ignorantly happy. He isn't as fun, he isn't as him. No scar, no lessons learned with blood and anguish. But this boy is blissfully unaware. There is an arrogance in this version that I do not see in others. He is gifted the grace of oblivion. His mother kisses his forehead, his father ruffles his hair. His uncles. His friends. His lovers. 

Thereis never as much depth to these relationships, but then again that means that there is so much less devastation when he is once again torn away. 

I wonder if there is a place where he lives out every afterlife. Perhaps that is where the tracks converge. A single Harry Potter, arrogant and humbled all in one soul.

I think it is too much to hope. 

_______________________ 

The pages of this boys life run on in an endless marathon. I want to burn this place to the ground. Watch every page become mangled and unreadable. I want to never see these green eyes again. I want them shut to the world, finally blind to all the brutal pain and loss. Is this my punishment? To watch an inferno burn itself to embers, a life lived itself to pale imitation. 

I can feel smoke in my eyes and yet they do not close. 

_______________________ 

 There is a life I find tucked next to a bookend. It is nothing special in its size, perhaps a meagre fifty years. It is unbound. 

On its pages I find a boy I have only seen in glimpses. His name is Harry Potter, and he is dazzling. His wit, his intelligence- it is truly beyond measure. In this life I find a boy who finds himself. His name is Harry Potter and he learns every rule in order to break them perfectly. His name is Harry Potter and in this telling he is so bright, so blue.

 This boy cuts the air he walks through. This boy walks through life like he is tearing through tissue paper. He knows too much, and too little. He knows everything, and it keeps him lonely. 

 In this life the defeat of evil is slow but succinct. No great loss of life, minimal collateral damage. With his intelligence comes what he has never had before; Coldness. Clarity. But it takes so many years. This boy keeps his blood cold when fighting flames and it leaves him frozen. This boy does not love, or cherish or mourn. This boy was smart, but so alone. What does he have? If not a flame, what is he?  

 This boy made out of stainless steel knives and chrome keeps himself alive, but he is not the boy I know. He ruffles the ink-black hair with the same hands, blinks through the same emerald eyes but a person is much more than their body. A person is their mind. 

This boy is too intelligent to be a hero. 

_______________________ 

 In almost every retelling this boy finds a mirror that shows him something he does not have.  

 This time I flip a green moleskin to a random page and find him sobbing on the floor. His sadness is symmetrical. I cannot see what he sees but for a moment I swear his eyes meet mine in the twisted looking glass. 

His stare cuts my soul. 

I throw the book against an iron shelf and a dozen more tumble to the ground. A dozen pointless tortures. His life scattered like bread crumbs for me to follow.

I need this to end.

_______________________

I want to cry for this universe. I want to shed hot tears onto the scribbled tale of this life and watch the paper warp itself into waves. I want to watch them crash against their bindings and break free.

 I mourn and I think that is my punishment. It is not just this bespectacled boy, but his family. His mother and his father. The men who raised him and the men he loved. I wish to weep tears for a freckled boy who wished himself king and a bushy haired girl who shined so bright. I want to flood their loyalty until it breaks because the purity of it breaks me. 

 There is a boy who loved with ice and cruelty and a girl that loved with silent reverence and so much strength. The boy who lived overshadowed and the girl that drifted in Dreamland. 

I feel them locked away in leather prisons and their lives rip my heart from my chest. Every breath they take is one I do not.

 They burn and I cannot watch them anymore. They burn and I cannot shed enough tears to put them out.

_______________________

In the end any tears I shed are just for him. My boy. Harry James Potter.

_______________________

Once he finds his best friend's sister dead on a damp floor and when the basilisk comes for him he does nothing to stop it.

Once he walks into a forest trembling with his own desperate desire to live and when the green light hits him he does not come back. He is punished for being too human to save the world. 

Once the train station that greets him is dirty and crowded with people and he does not wait for the twinkling-eyed man to reach him before stepping on the train. He has no wish to continue this party.

Once, he dies of the flu in a cupboard under the stairs because his uncle insisted it was just a cold. He is a child.

Once upon a time a boy lived and died and died and died and died and I could do nothing but watch. 

_______________________

One day I find the end of the cavernous book shelves and I feel my own heart stop in my chest. I stopped reading the lives miles ago- just ran and ran and ran and tried to find a boy who God damn lived. But I am at my end now.

I see the world and it is nothing special. It is a brick wall that you can not run through. It is stone stacked shoddily on mortar and nothing else.

I can feel cold wind whistle through the cracks. Next to me the stacks of his lives taunt me and the floor beneath me is cold.  

 There is nothing more for me. Just concrete and leather and pages and pages of loss. 

 Just this life, and my eyes left to treasure it. I turn to the closest shelf, and feel cold leather beneath my fingers.

I begin the story again.

______________________

 **People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around-** Sir Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you have a fantastic day my love's.


End file.
